National Trail System
In 1965 the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, a federal agency, appointed a commission to make a nationwide trails study. The commission, noting that walking for pleasure was second only to driving for pleasure as the most popular recreation in America, recommended establishing a national system of trails of two kinds—long National Scenic Trails in the hinterlands and shorter National Recreation Trails in and near metropolitan areas. The commission recommended that Congress establish four Scenic Trails—the already existing Appalachian Trail, the partly existing Pacific Crest Trail, a Potomac Heritage Trail and a Continental Divide Trail. Congress responded by passing, in 1968, the National Trails System Act, which set the framework for a system of trails and specifically made the Appalachian and the Pacific Crest trails the first two National Scenic trails.
The Proposed Route
Meanwhile, in California, the Forest Service in 1965 had held a series of meetings about a route for the PCT in the state. These meetings involved people from the Forest Service, the Park Service, the State Division of Parks and Beaches, and other government bodies charged with responsibility over areas where the trail might go. These people decided that so much time had elapsed since Clarke had drawn his route that they should essentially start all over. Of course, it was pretty obvious that segments like the John Muir Trail would not be overlooked in choosing a new route through California. By the end of 1965 a proposed route had been drawn onto maps. (We don’t say “mapped,” for that would imply that someone actually had covered the route in the field.)
When Congress, in the 1968 law, created a citizens Advisory Council for the PCT, it was the route devised in 1965 which the Forest Service presented to the council as a “first draft” of a final PCT route. This body of citizens was to decide all the details of the final route; the Forest Service said it would adopt whatever the citizens wanted. The Advisory Council was also to concern itself with standards for the physical nature of the trail, markers to be erected along the trail, and the administration of the trail and its use.
In 1972 the Advisory Council agreed upon a route, and the Forest Service put it onto maps for internal use. Since much of the agreed-upon route was cross-country, these maps were sent to the various national forests along the route, for them to mark a temporary route in the places where no trail existed along the final PCT route. This they did—but not always after field work. The result was that the maps made available to the public in June 1972 showing the final proposed route and the temporary detours did not correspond to what was on the ground in many places. A common flaw was that the Forest Service showed a temporary or permanent PCT segment following a trail taken from a pre-existing Forest Service map, when in fact there was no trail where it was shown on that map in the first place.
Perfect or not, the final proposed route was sent to Washington for publication in the Federal Register, the next step toward its becoming official. A verbal description of the route was also published in the Federal Register on January 30, 1973. But the material in the register did not give a precise route which could be unambiguously followed; it was only a general route, and the details in many places remained to be settled.
Private Property Glitches
As construction on PCT trail segments began, many hikers were optimistic that the entire trail could be completed within a decade. Perhaps it could have, if it weren’t for private property located along the proposed route. While some owners readily allowed rights-of-way, many others did not, at least initially, and years of negotiations passed before some rights were finally secured. While negotiations were in progress, the Forest Service sometimes built new trail segments on both sides of a parcel of private land, expecting to extend a trail segment through it soon after. At times this approach backfired, such as in the northern Sierra Nevada in the Gibraltar environs (Map M3 in this book). The owners of some property never gave up a right-of-way, and so a new stretch of trail on Gibraltar’s south slopes was abandoned for a snowier, costlier stretch on its north slopes, completed in fall 1985. But at least the stretch was built, which was not true for a short stretch northwest of Sierra Buttes (Map M1, Section 7), where the PCT route is a road.
PCT logo
The major obstacle to the trail’s completion had been the mammoth Tejon Ranch, which began in Civil War days as a sheep ranch, then later became a cattle ranch, and in 1936 became a public corporation that diversified its land use and increased its acreage. This “ranch,” about the size of Sequoia National Park, straddles most of the Tehachapi Mountains. An agreement between the ranch’s owners and government representatives finally was reached, and in 1993 this section of the PCT was completed. However, rather than traversing the length of the Tehachapi Mountains as intended by Congress, the PCT for the most part follows miles of roads along the west side of desert-like Antelope Valley before ascending to the edge of ranch property in the north part of the range. The trail is described in Pacific Crest Trail: Southern California, this book’s companion volume
Finally, there is another stretch in northern California, (Section Q and the start of Section R), where a trail will not replace existing roads. Private property was part of the problem, but also building a horse bridge across the Klamath River proved economically unfeasible. One still treads 7.3 miles along roads, which is a blessing in disguise, for if the trail and bridge had been built, you would have bypassed Seiad Valley, a very important resupply point.
“Golden Spike” Dedication
The Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail officially was dedicated on Nationals Trails Day, June 5, 1993, a lengthy 25 years after Congress passed the National Trails System Act that had mandated it. The dedication was touted as the “Golden Spike” Completion Ceremony, in which a “golden” spike was driven into the trail, a reenactment of the 1869 ceremony at Promontory Point, near Ogden, Utah, where the converging Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroad companies joined to complete the transcontinental railroad. For the PCT, there were no competing trail crews, and the completion site should have been in the Tehachapi Mountains. However, the public was (and is) not welcome on the Tejon Ranch, and since that area is out of the way, a PCT site closer to metropolitan southern California was chosen: a flat at the mouth of a small valley on the north side of Soledad Canyon (Map D13 Pacific Crest Trail: Southern California). Protected under a canopy to shelter them from the unseasonably cold, windy, drizzly weather, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and others spoke to an unsheltered audience of about 300 hearty souls (and a dozen or so others protesting various unrelated environmental issues). The trail was proclaimed to be 2638 miles long officially, though the accuracy of this mileage may be questionable, since this number existed as early as 1990, before the completion of several stretches in southern California and in the southern Sierra Nevada, and before the major relocation of the Hat Creek Rim stretch north of Lassen Volcanic National Park. Future relocations are likely, and so the authors of the Pacific Crest Trail books, for better or for worse, have used mileages that they have measured either directly along the trail or indirectly along the route they accurately drew on topographic maps.
Some Who Walked and Rode
No doubt hikers did parts of the Pacific Crest Trail in the 19th Century—though that name for it didn’t exist. It may be that someone walked along the crest from Mexico to Canada or vice